Reading Acts: U.S. Readers' Interactions With Literature, 1800-1950

by Ryan, Barbara; Thomas, Amy M.

• ISBN13: 9781572331822
• ISBN10: 1572331828
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Tennessee Pr

Summary

Drawing on such original sources as diaries, commonplace books, fan mail to authors, booksellers' reports, and student papers, the contributors to Reading Acts recover a wealth of important historical information that expands our understanding of reading in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emphasis throughout is on the act of reading and the attendant proposition that reading acts upon those who read.

Covered in this volume are a wide range of fascinating topics, including the cultural agency of women during the early national period; readers' criticisms of the critics in the 1830s; readers' relationships with beloved authors after the Second Industrial Revolution; and attitudes toward single motherhood in the mid-twentieth century as revealed in readers' responses to a True Confessions magazine article. Contributors from diverse fields and disciplines highlight the ways in which human diversity -- and often contrariness -- are reflected in reading habits and enthusiasms. They show how a desire to read and a love of r

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
"Blunted Hearts": Female Readers and Printed Authority in the Early Republic	p. 1
"This Cultivated Mind": Reading and Identity in a Nineteenth-Century Reader	p. 29
Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America	p. 53
The Reader Retailored: Thomas Carlyle, His American Audiences, and the Politics of Evidence	p. 79
Reading the Silences: Documenting the History of American Tract Society Readers in the Antebellum South	p. 107
Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America: Cultural Consumption, Conspicuous and Otherwise	p. 137
"A Real Basis from Which to Judge": Fan Mail to Gene Stratton-Porter	p. 161
"Ornaments, Tools, or Friends": Literary Reading at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938	p. 179
Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States	p. 199
"You Make Us Articulate": Reading, Education, and Community in Dorothy Canfield's Middlebrow America	p. 229
"They Flash upon That Inward Eye": Poetry Recitation and American Readers	p. 259
Selected Bibliography	p. 281
Contributors	p. 283
Index	p. 285
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